# Issue No. 148

 Wishing you and yours a happy holiday season here at The Orbital Index! We hope you're able to spend time with friends and family over the next few weeks and take some time away from work (unless you’re on the JWST launch team!). We appreciate all of you and always love connecting with our readers—so don’t hesitate to reach out.

# The Orbital Index

Issue No. 148 | Dec 22, 2021

🚀 🎁 🛰

 ¶Crossing our fingers for the JWST. The James Webb Space Telescope, the “most powerful and complex space telescope ever built,” will hopefully launch on Christmas Day after having been delayed a first time due to a communication issue between the observatory and the launch vehicle and then again for bad weather. First funded in 1996 and repeatedly delayed, the telescope is now 13 years behind schedule and $4.7 billion over budget (it was originally estimated at$1.6B during early planning, but the realistic estimate on construction approval in 2008 was ~$5B, and it ended up costing$9.7B). JWST is a long-wavelength telescope with 18 hexagonal, individually-controlled, gold-plated beryllium mirror segments that fold out after launch into a ‘golden sunflower’ to create a whopping 6.5-meter diameter mirror—over six times the collecting area of Hubble’s puny 2.4 m aperture. Observing in infrared, JWST will be able to see old and distant highly redshifted objects that Hubble cannot and that we have trouble seeing from the ground due to Earth’s atmospheric opacity to many infrared bands. These distant objects will hopefully tell us about early star and galaxy formation. JWST should also be able to study exoplanet atmospheres, Kuiper belt objects, and even Saturn-sized exoplanets. To keep the onboard imagers and spectrometers cold enough for these infrared observations, JWST will orbit 1.5 million km away at the Earth-Sun L2 point (three times the distance to the Moon) and utilize a complex, multi-layered sunshield (image) to stay below 50 K. Orbiting at L2 requires fuel for station keeping, giving JWST a 10-year lifespan, with observations hopefully starting in about six months. Here’s wishing for a Starship servicing mission that can be put together in the early 2030s to keep the science flowing! Also, JWST’s deployment process involves 50 deployments and 344 single-points of failure. As Thomas Zurbuchen said, “Those who are not worried or even terrified about this are not understanding what we are trying to do.”
 ¶News in brief. A Chinese Kuaizhou-1A solid-fuel rocket failed during launch, losing Geespace’s first two experimental autonomous car navigation satellites ● Bill Gates’s Breakthrough Energy Ventures led a $65 million round in STOKE Space, builder of a small rocket with a reusable upper stage that sounds like a mini-Starship (watch their intro video) ● Due to BE-4 engine delays, ULA's Vulcan debut may slip to 2023 ● As Yusaku Maezawa returned to Earth, Roscosmos plans to increase crewed Soyuz MS production to four per year to meet space tourism demand ● Ingenuity has now flown 17 18 times, racking up a total flight time of 30 min 32 min and 52 seconds and distance of 3.7 km.  ¶Etc.Seasons Yeetings: Xyla Foxlin and Joe Barnard made a Christmas Tree pull 3.6Gs while launching it with friends in the Mojave Desert. 🎄🚀 NASA decided not to rename the JWST, despite pressure (and a petition) around its being named after former NASA administrator James Webb, “who went along with government discrimination against gay and lesbian employees in the 1950s and 1960s.” Astrobites has a summary.A thread on the valuation of Virgin Orbit as it heads for a SPAC. The company’s investment deck valued the smallsat launch market at$25 B in 2030, based on the analysis of a little-known industry outsider market intelligence company. “According to this report, the market for satellites <100kg in 2020 was worth 1,5B$… [and] at that price point each nano/microsatellite would cost >400,000$/kg, i.e. the price of the most expensive space programmes in the World such as SBIRS, Helios, Keyhole or Falconeye.” 🤨 FAA says lack of federal whistleblower protections is an “enormous factor” hindering Blue Origin’s safety review.Our friend Andris Slavinskis over at the UT Tartu Observatory put together a video attempting to summarize the history of the Universe. (Andris was also involved with ESTCube-2—a test of electric solar wind sails—and is working on ESA’s Comet Interceptor.)In 2012, NASA’s OIG wrote (pdf) that “many project managers we spoke with mentioned the ‘Hubble Psychology’ – an expectation among NASA personnel that projects that fail to meet cost and schedule goals will receive additional funding and that subsequent scientific and technological success will overshadow any budgetary and schedule problems. They pointed out that although Hubble greatly exceeded its original budget, launched years after promised, and suffered a significant technological problem that required costly repair missions, the telescope is now generally viewed as a national treasure and its initial cost and performance issues have largely been forgotten.” May JWST experience the same fate. Visualizing all known exoplanets.“In this paper we describe the use of an on-board COTS JavaScript engine, hosted within the flight software, to provide the event-driven operations for JWST.” More discussion by someone involved. 😱